An intriguing, introspective, and parablelike sci-fi/fantasy tale with moralistic edgings, more idea-based than...
A spacegoing researcher who studies the religious folklore of aliens dangerously violates noninterference protocols.
Sidanius’ (Five Blocks Down, 2016) sci-fi novel introduces Li, part of a nomadic race called Spacefarers. Eons ago, their king refused a god’s harsh command to sacrifice a child. As punishment, their home world became engulfed by their sun, with the Spacefarers taking to the stars. Now, with evolved bodies granting them translucent forms that allow chameleonlike camouflage, they travel the cosmos as secret recorders of traditions and folktales of alien species—especially recurring “sacrifice narratives.” It turns out that many species hear deities demanding the ritualistic killings of animals or their own kind. Li is more sensitive than most Spacefarers after witnessing numerous slaughters. On the drought-stricken world of Plena, she monitors a “holy man” called Bram about to kill his own son to appease the heavens. Unable to stand by impartially, Li calls from her hiding place and prevents the sacrifice. Subsequently, she is tormented by her action and whether to tell her superiors that she violated a prime directive of noninterference. Moreover, Li receives visions of lives and mores on Plena drastically altered by her meddling. This novel is, of course, an adaptation of the Old Testament tale of Abraham (Bram) and Isaac. But the book never becomes a hoary, sci-fi shaggy god story with rocket-ship versions of Adam, Eve, or Noah as the punchlines. Sidanius’ prose is limpid and unhurried (perhaps a trifle too unhurried) and suffused with melancholy as Spacefarers gather centuries of ethnographic data. This is apparently a bid to come to existential terms with their own expelled-from-Eden condition (nobody discusses investigating the mysterious holy spirits). There’s an ever-so-metaphorical detail that to survive space, the Spacefarers’ adapted anatomy eliminated hearts—though conscience-stricken Li continually feels twinges from her “phantom” one. Her empathetic qualities make her shed the cold impartiality of a detached field researcher. While traditional sci-fi notions—Einsteinian relativity and quantum entanglement—figure into the plot, there seems to be a deliberate attempt to steer clear of the white-lab-coat exposition of hard sci-fi and technology and render the material fablelike. Even when Li takes desperate action, it’s far from zap guns and straining warp engines. Fans of Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, and other humanist, anthropology-minded sci-fi masters are the ideal readership.
An intriguing, introspective, and parablelike sci-fi/fantasy tale with moralistic edgings, more idea-based than thrill-oriented.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A heartwarming portrait of a broken heart finding a little healing magic.
After acing a job interview and accepting a marriage proposal, Dannie Kohan has had the perfect day. That is, until she awakens to find herself five years in the future with a completely different man.
Just one hour in that alternate reality shakes Dannie to her core. After all, highly ambitious Dannie and her boyfriend, David, have plotted out their lives in minute detail, and the sexy man in her dream—was it a dream?—is most certainly not in the script. Serle (The Dinner List, 2018) deftly spins these magical threads into Dannie’s perfectly structured life, leaving not only Dannie, but also the reader wondering whether Dannie time traveled or hallucinated. Her best friend, Bella, would delight in the story given that she thinks Dannie is much too straight-laced, and some spicy dreaming might push Dannie to find someone more passionate than David. Unfortunately, glamorous Bella is in Europe with her latest lover. Ever pragmatic, Dannie consults her therapist, who almost concurs that it was likely a dream, and throws herself into her work. Pleased to have landed the job at a prestigious law firm, Dannie easily loses her worries in litigation. Soon four and a half years have passed with no wedding date set, and Bella is back in the U.S. with a new man in her life. A man who turns out to be literally the man of Dannie’s dream. The sheer fact of Aaron Gregory’s existence forces Dannie to reevaluate her trust in the laws of physics as well as her decision to marry David, a decision that seems less believable with each passing day. And as the architecture of Dannie’s overplanned life disintegrates, Serle twists and twines the remnants of her dream into a surprising future.
A heartwarming portrait of a broken heart finding a little healing magic.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3744-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...
The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.
The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-58320-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
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